The Class Literacy Clubs

The ‘Class Literacy Clubs’ was an idea I generated for my Year 3 groups as a means to provide them a platform to exercise their Literacy skills. It was heart-warming to see how naturally their creative, artistic and literary choices intermingled with a conscious approach to express their inner desires.

At the beginning of each academic year, I prepared and dedicated one soft board entirely to this learning concept and spoke to the parents at length about its objectives at the Student Orientation Day.

The Clubs were:

Writers Dome

Poets Gallery

Readers Ring

Speakers Shoal

The most important targets to achieve through these clubs were:

1.   Create a conscious awareness of the ‘Four integral Literacy Skills’ attached to the English language.

2.   Provide a stage for them to put into practice and apply their understanding of what they acquire from their Literacy lessons.

3.  To replace the drudgery of learning a language into something exciting and worthy of attention.

4.  To realize their own artistic inclinations and discover their hidden talents on expression.

5.  Grow in their vocabulary and comprehension abilities through precise interpretation of the ‘Weekly Themes’.

6.  Create a timeline to observe their ‘Language Achievement’ growth from the beginning of the year till the end.

7. Promote an air of participation with choice and reward them with promised incentives.

8.  Develop a critical ear through sharing of text and ideas across the classroom.

9.  Appreciate each other’s work and efforts.

10.               Frame short story and poetry books for the School Book Week to display in the Library. Book reviews were displayed on to chart papers to grace the library walls again!

Every week a theme was chosen by the class through voting. The theme would be marked into their diaries for parents to acknowledge and encourage their children to present their ideas either in printed form or simply using a pencil.

At first the more interested lot presented their theme depiction in beautiful art work and colours. The ones who did not take the incentive too seriously deposited their torn pieces of paper with much scribbling. I accepted their work and displayed it along with the shiny ones on the soft board. Quite naturally, their next contributions were much more focused and carried a little more thought!

The idea of this programme was to instil in each child a sense of pride in the way they interpreted and perceived their ideas. They enjoyed working on different themes as, ‘Alien’,  ‘Magic’, ‘Outer Space’, ‘Famous Neighbour’ and ‘My Character Theme’!

Apart from that, they proudly created a series of story books on paper with illustrations on two outer space characters named ‘Bugsy and Fireball!’ They worked in groups to create various adventures for these characters and these were presented to the library to showcase their hard work!

In the Year 3 Newsletter, we had designed a special space for these Club Cadets who selected the most interesting pieces and then provided a critical analysis on them. The ones in the Speakers Shoal often participated by sharing their views on their friends work and at times shared their ideas in the School Assembly as well.

Some of the most memorable rewards that these Club Cadets enjoyed were watching E-T for contributing to the Outer Space theme and a magical ball for their Magic Theme. The children and teachers came dressed to compliment the themes and it was the greatest motivational tool that I’ve ever used.

The Class Literacy Clubs fulfilled many desired objectives and at the same time provided all of us with an opportunity to appreciate each other’s Creative Crafts!